James Blunt, All the Lost Souls

Vast success traditionally has an alienating effect on rock stars. Fame and wealth removes them from the real world, insulating them from public opinion. You would be forgiven for assuming such a fate had befallen James Blunt. Two years into his recording career, he lives in an Ibizan mansion with a nightclub in its basement, paid for with the proceeds of the biggest-selling album of the 21st century thus far: his debut, Back to Bedlam, has shifted 14m copies. If you believe the gossip columns, his life seems to primarily consist of getting his aristocratic leg over with celebrity hotties: Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Mischa Barton, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and a Pussycat Doll, names that rather suggest intellectual profundity may not be uppermost in the former Household Cavlary officer's check-list of feminine prerequisites. But despite the rarefied lifestyle, news has clearly reached Blunt that a lot of people seem to hate both him and his music. "Me and my guitar play my way," he wails, midway through Back to Bedlam's follow-up, on a song called Give Me Some Love. "It makes them frown."

It's difficult to know how upset Blunt is by the adverse reaction to his success. He certainly sounds upset: he sings Give Me Some Love in a tremulous warble, replete with pregnant pauses, suggestive of brimming eyes and quivering lips. But then James Blunt sings everything like that. The tremulous warble replete with pregnant pauses is his default vocal setting. Live, he has tremulously warbled the Pixies' visceral Where Is My Mind? and tremulously warbled Supertramp's jaunty Breakfast in America. In the admittedly unlikely event that Back to Bedlam's follow-up contained a cover of Boney M's Hooray! Hooray! It's A Holi-Holiday!, he'd tremulously warble that as well.

Nevertheless, Give Me Some Love offers further evidence of the effect the opprobrium has had on the singer. It seems to have brought on a debilitating attack of dyslexia. "Won't you give me some love?" he sings, adding bafflingly: "I've taken shipload of drugs." Perhaps a shipload is like a shitload, only bigger, evocative of the vast container vessels that sail the world's seas. Perhaps he's substituted the letter t with p for reasons of probity: this is, after all, an artist beloved of censorious Middle England. Or perhaps his detractors are right and it doesn't mean anything. Perhaps it's just a crock of ship.

Still, not even his loudest detractors could call him sloppy. As befits a former military man, All the Lost Souls is a model of ruthless efficiency. A crack team of co-writers has been assembled: his collaborators have variously worked with Britney Spears, Dr Dre, Robbie Williams, and - rather more pertinently, cynics might suggest - Daniel O'Donnell and James Last. The results are slick. It would be churlish to deny that One of the Brightest Stars has a nice tune, or that there's something compulsive about the piano riff of I'll Take Everything. Occasionally, however, Blunt appears to be following a successful formula a little too mechanically for his own good, as if he's ticking boxes. A song about the end of a relationship that implies the other participant may be dying: check. Song pondering the ramifications of Blunt's role in the Kosovo conflict: check. Song that attempts to assert Blunt's love of music by making slightly clanging references to classic rock: check.

Elsewhere, songs ruminate about celebrity, among them the deeply peculiar Annie, on which the titular heroine's failure to achieve fame is bemoaned -"Did it all come tumbling down?" - and Blunt, gallant to the last, offers her the opportunity to fellate him as a kind of consolation prize: "Will you go down on me?" More bizarre still, he offers her the opportunity to fellate him in the kind of voice normally associated with the terminally ill asking a doctor how long they've got left: tremulous, replete with pregnant pauses, suggestive of brimming eyes, etc. The overall effect is so bizarre that it overshadows anything Blunt may have to say about the fickle nature of fame. You come away convinced that the song's underlying message is: give me a blow job or I'll cry.

But then, as has been established, Blunt always sounds like that, which may be All the Lost Souls' big problem. If you sing about killing a man, as Blunt does on I Really Want You, in precisely the same voice you use to sing about fellatio, it's bound to have an emotionally levelling effect: you're going to come across as if you don't mean any of it. And perhaps that, rather than his class or his looks or his success, is the reason so many people dislike James Blunt. There's something weirdly insincere about what he does. He sounds, as he himself would put it, like a bit of a bullshipper.